Tom Moon

Daniel Levi Goans and Lauren Plank Goans are used to fielding questions about the overlap between their musical and marital partnerships. If anything, they've invited this sort of curiosity by telling their backstory the way they have: him striking up a conversation after overhearing her singing to herself at a ...

Really, how much hoodoo can there be out in the desert?

Drive through it, and the romance of the place might elude you. A closer engagement, on foot, may prove even less enchanting. The feeling of myth and mystery that many have immortalized, from Gram Parsons on down, is not ...

Working as a music journalist means that some days you get to tell people, in breathless prose, about an incredible new record you've discovered. On other days, you have to tell people that an artist you've followed and respected for years is no longer living. That part is never any ...

Dom La Nena is a singer and cellist from Brazil. But the 24-year-old artist draws inspiration from her travels around the world and sings in four different languages on her sophomore album, Soyo.

The glissando (gliss for short) is a musical term describing the sound of an instrument as it glides from one pitch to another. A favorite trick of jazz hornmen and slide guitarists, the gliss can be a woozy, gleeful sound or a mournful one. When executed by a virtuoso violinist, ...

He asks a lot of questions, this José González.

He opened his last album, 2013's band project Junip, with a thought experiment Nietzsche could love: "What would you do if it all came back to you?" The song, "Line Of Fire," dwells in a mood of idle 3 a.m. ...

Countless bands perform a variation on the medium-uptempo edge-of-rage eruption perfected by the likes of the Pixies and Green Day. It's become so ubiquitous, you almost don't have to listen: It's possible to get a headline-news sense of the song without fully apprehending the words. The spike in the guitar ...

"Night Faces," the opening track from Jessica Pratt's extraordinary 2012 debut, showcased a singular ability to transform a worn-out cliche into something stirring. Just through the choices she made as a singer.

Pratt's verses wallow, at times, in tortured confessional rhymes — one from "Night Faces" has her shedding ...

You can tell a lot about a songwriter by what occurs in the space between verses. Many writers — hacks and gifted souls alike — will treat an instrumental expanse as a kind of please-stand-by strumming wallpaper, a palate cleanser for the ear. In this strategy, derived from folk music, ...

There's usually reason to be apprehensive when an artist spends years in the workshop on a single set of songs. But nearly 15 years after Voodoo, the R&B singer still makes tricky music sound easy.

Melissa Block talks with reviewer Tom Moon about musician Bobby Keys, has died at the age of 70. He was the Rolling Stones saxophonist for decades.

The 69-year-old singer returns to the brooding style he pioneered with Roxy Music in the 1970s and early '80s — and the result is some of his best solo work.

While The Endless River may not satisfy song-hungry fans, it does make clear the group's knack for lush textural explorations.

The dog's name was Hamlet.

He lived at the house known as Big Pink, in the woods near Woodstock, and during the summer of 1967, responsibility for his care was shared by Bob Dylan and members of The Band. Hamlet was on the scene during the fruitful recording ...

The Sunday-school singalong "You Are My Sunshine" is the rare evergreen that seems to withstand all manner of musical abuse. There have been disco versions and polka versions, as well as plenty of earnest renderings — from Bing Crosby to late-career Johnny Cash to Ray Charles, whose ...

NPR's Melissa Block and music critic Tom Moon discuss the thrill of intimacy on three new albums by duos.

Two new albums, a solo effort and a collaboration with the band 3RDEYEGIRL, mark Prince's return to the studio. Tom Moon says that only one fully captures what an explosive performer he can still be.

This is not Dueling Banjos: The Married Couple Edition. You won't find the careening energy of the mano-a-mano from the Deliverance soundtrack, or of the Flatt and Scruggs classic "Foggy Mountain Breakdown." Outbreaks of dazzling, speed-demon technique are few.

Instead, the first duo recording from Bela Fleck and

Electronic producer and composer Richard D. James returns to recording after a 13-year absence, with an album that stands refreshingly askew next to mainstream EDM.

There's something wonderfully contrarian about Lucinda Williams ending one of her multi-year silences with a double album. In 2014, no one is supposed to have time to appreciate three straight songs from one artist, much less an entire album.

So here comes Williams, the perceptive and much-lauded songwriter whose ...